Forgotten Silver (1996)

Film in Review

Meet Colin McKenzie. This hitherto unknown New Zealand filmmaker is the revelation of the season, a pioneer of the cinema whose epic vision and inventiveness compel total revision of the history books. Colin McKenzie is a genius of cinema worthy to stand alongside the Lumiere brothers, D. W. Griffith and Chaplin.

Worthy, that is, had Colin McKenzie ever existed.

Colin McKenzie and his remarkable films are, in fact, the subjects of a delightful spoof from New Zealand called ''Forgotten Silver,'' which opens today at the Quad Cinema, 34 West 13th Street, in Greenwich Village. Made by Peter Jackson and Costa Botes, ''Forgotten Silver'' is a splendid tall tale. Like a combination of Woody Allen's ''Zelig'' and Rob Reiner's ''This Is Spinal Tap,'' this rich comedy manages simultaneously to position its hero in the path of great events while sending up its subject, film history, with informed skill, great affection and mischievous glee.

Taking the form of a documentary cinematic detective story, ''Forgotten Silver'' begins with the discovery by Mr. Jackson of a hoard of old films in a neighbor's shed. Through these lost films and narration that features Mr. Jackson, the film writer and commentator Leonard Maltin, the actor Sam Neill and Harvey Weinstein of Miramax Films, ''Forgotten Silver'' tells the story of the fabulous McKenzie.

Born in New Zealand in 1888 and galvanized at 12 by a traveling picture show, he immediately found his true calling. Using bicycle chains, he built his first camera; using steam power, he ran his projector; using egg whites, he made his own film. Thanks to a date on a newspaper jutting from the pocket of an onlooker, it is clear that McKenzie's camera recorded the first successful flight of a heavier-than-air machine -- piloted by the New Zealander Richard Pearse nine months before the Wright brothers at Kitty Hawk.

But McKenzie's amazing career was to be dogged by difficulty and tragedy. His father confiscated his film. McKenzie ran off. With his brother, he made the world's first feature and the world's first talkie, in 1908. Unfortunately, it was entirely in Chinese, and since there were no subtitles, audiences walked out.

By 1911, on Tahiti, using a local berry, the McKenzies were making color films; but when they returned to New Zealand to screen their work for potential investors, the bare breasts of women in one scene led to Colin's arrest, trial and imprisonment for six months after the jury requested multiple screenings and deliberated for more than 30 hours.

Colin turned to the Bible, which led to the project that was to occupy him for much of the rest of his life. His film of the story of Salome and John the Baptist was interrupted by World War I, family tragedies, financial reverses, excursions into Chaplinesque comedy and encounters with Hollywood, Stalinist Communism and the mob before McKenzie vanished into self-imposed exile and a role in the Spanish Civil War. The work did, however, become his crowning achievement. It would probably have remained unseen but for the discovery of the immense lost city of Jerusalem he had constructed in New Zealand's western bush. LAWRENCE VAN GELDER